Fury of a Phoenix (The Nix Series Book 1) Read online

  Time to go. On the other side of the room, Justin was moving too in our direction.

  I grabbed Bear’s hand and hurried us to the front door.

  “I need help bringing in the food for the potluck.” I stopped by the door, took my coat off the hanger and slipped it on. Justin reached up and popped a package of cigarette’s out of his shirt pocket. “I need a smoke break.”

  Bear tipped his head sideways at me, a single eyebrow arched high. The look was so reminiscent of his grandfather my heart stuttered.

  Bear was nothing like my father. He was nothing like that miserable bastard.

  I clung to Bear’s hand as the truck slammed into the first tree on the passenger side. “Hang on, baby. I got you.”

  Justin wrestled with the truck, but the steering wheel didn’t respond. “Brakes are gone. Deep breath, we’re going in!”

  A screech of trees clawing at the sides of the truck did nothing to slow our headlong rush off the side of the road, down the hill to the icy water of the lake below. A swirl of green slid through the truck, touching on each of us.

  This was no accident.

  We were strong swimmers, all three of us, we’d make it out. We’d make it out, we would, as long as we could dodge the magic swirling around us.

  “Deep breath, baby!” I kept my eyes on Bear, kept him looking at me, my head trying to tell me what was happening while my heart refused it. Fear had never been like this before. Eating its way through me from the inside out like a violent maggot.

  Something exploded right under the truck halfway down the hill, and we were thrust into the air, the green light deepening until it was nearly black, filling the cab with smoke. Smoke that smelled like rot and death. The truck rolled, and my hand was yanked out of Bear’s as he slammed against his side of the truck.

  Over and over we flipped, the truck smashing harder with each rotation, the metal bending, the truck that should have protected us in a crash turning into a twisted death trap. Metal squealed as it tore, shooting through the cab like rusted spears.

  The hill leveled out as it reached the edge of the lake and the truck slowed its rapid, violent descent, and turned into a slalom that sent us into the lake.

  The crash was over, as suddenly as it started. The truck was silent except for the burble of water under it, beginning to reach into the cab.

  My body and mind wanted me to be still, to take stock of the damage to my legs and torso. My heart wouldn’t allow it.

  I scrambled as true, thick gray smoke began to fill the cab through a hole in the floor. I fought to get my seatbelt off, to reach for Bear . . . a rumble that sounded like thunder rippled through the air.

  Thunder where there was no storm.

  The magic had found me.

  “What’s that look for?” I brushed a finger down the middle of Bear’s nose, a replica of my own.

  He laughed and shook his head. “I have a surprise for you. But I’ll wait.”

  “A surprise?” I made a mock grab for him. “Well, I bet I can torture the information out of you.”

  Justin laughed and followed us out as we ran across the yard. He strolled to where our old Ford was parked, looking perfectly at home amongst all the other trucks and four-wheelers. Bear ran around the truck once and I chased him, sliding on the hard-packed snow. Justin cheered us on back and forth. All the irritation in me was gone in a single breath because this was where I belonged. Here with my boy and my husband, in the open fresh winter air, free from everything. I was not the killer of my past, but a mother now. A mother with a son who was her whole world.

  I caught Bear on the second go around the truck and swept him into the air despite his size. Working with horses and continuing with Zee’s training had kept me fit and strong. Planting a kiss on his cheek, I didn’t mind that he squirmed. It wouldn’t be long before he would be too big for his mama’s kisses. My heart gave a twinge at the thought of losing that. My boy was growing up far too fast for my liking. One day, I might have to tell him who I really was, and about the family I’d left behind and why. I did not relish those thoughts.

  “Mama, are you crying?” He reached up and touched my cheek, concern etched into his young face. Only Bear and Justin . . . they were the only ones worthy of my tears. Justin was there in a flash, his hand warm against the back of my neck. I looked at him, let him see the sorrow for a split second.

  I cleared my throat. “Snowflake in my eyes.”

  Bear laughed and rolled his eyes. “Sure.”

  We grabbed—or I should say I grabbed—the single pot from the back of the truck. A batch of homemade pierogis I’d learned to make from an old recipe book were still warm. I was not a natural cook, but I made sure it looked like I was with every meal I made. Hell, it was no different than putting together a fine-tuned poison that couldn’t be detected until it was too late. Follow the recipe, don’t deviate and it would turn out fine.

  Justin put his cigarette out in the snow, and blew a final puff of smoke. His arm snaked around me waist and he tugged me against him. “Okay?”

  “Yeah, just trying not to smack Mary-Ellen.”

  He kissed the side of my head. “You haven’t yet, I think you can hold out until dinner is over.”

  I rolled my eyes at him and shook my head.

  Bear settled in to walk beside me, matching my slow pace as we headed toward the house. “You left the food out here in the truck for an escape, didn’t you?”

  Justin grunted. “Smart boy of mine.”

  I glanced at him. “Yes. Well, I thought it best for all parties involved for me to have an out.” Before I started lashing out at people, before I started in on the paranoia. Control was something I had in spades after all this time, but that didn’t mean I wanted to push it. There was always that possibility I would snap back to where I’d been before. Shoot first, ask questions later.

  He nodded his eyes wide. “That’s cool. You can always tell me we need to talk. People wouldn’t question that, would they? Like maybe I’m in trouble for something?”

  I slowed and then stopped and looked at him. Seeing all that I could have been if not for my training. Innocent. Loving. Giving. “That’s . . . the best gift you could have given me.”

  His grin was all I needed to get moving again. Unlike me, he loved the limelight. He had to get that from Justin and his desire to be seen by the world. The one thing that had almost turned me away from his father when we first met.

  He ran ahead of us and Justin tightened his hold on me. “If it’s too much with the crowd, we can go.”

  I let myself lean into him, let him carry some of my anxiety for just a moment. Let him be my rock. “I’ll be okay.”

  “I love you, Bea.” He pressed his mouth to mine gently, catching me off guard. Not that he wasn’t affectionate, but because public displays of affection were not common for either of us. In his own way, despite loving the limelight, he was a private kind of guy. I kissed him back, the kiss anchoring me, taking me back to the first time he’d kissed me and I’d actually felt something in return. The first time I began to understand that not all men were assholes.

  He stepped back and winked. “That hold you until later?”

  I couldn’t help the laugh. “Warming me up, are you?”

  He waggled his eyebrows and swept a hand out to indicate I should go ahead of him.

  Stepping into the house, the noise and crush of people didn’t seem as overwhelming as the first time in, though I knew the numbers hadn’t changed. The clear cold air had wiped away the sense of foreboding. I handed off the pierogis to the ladies in the kitchen with Bear at my side. When his friends called to him he looked to me.

  “Mama, can I go?”

  Maybe, but I heard the real question: Did I need him? My heart swelled as I ran a hand over his soft thick hair. “Go have fun. I’m fine. Your dad can keep me company.”

  He was gone in a flash and Justin stood there with me watching. “We got lucky with him.”

  I
turned in his arms, not caring that we were in public. “Our son is damn amazing.”

  “Hey, don’t cuss here. You’ll get us kicked out before the food is served and it looks like quite the spread.” He tweaked my nose gently. I looked to his face, my eyes tracing the scars that ran down the side of his face from a skiing accident years ago.

  This life was not what I’d ever thought I’d have. Normal. Safe. Loving.

  I laughed softly—the sound of my own laughter still strange to my ears—and put my head against his chest. He tightened his arms around me. “I talked to Noah earlier. I have to go to California again next week. Hollywood, if you can believe it.”

  A sigh slid out of me. “He may be your best friend, but I think lately he’s been trying to see if he can spend more time with you than me and Bear. You cheating on me with him?”

  He laughed and shook his head. “His legs aren’t as nice as yours.”

  A sigh slid from him, and with it went the mirth. “It’s another promo possibility. The sponsors won’t sign me if I don’t show the right amount of willingness. You know that. And we could use the money. The roof is going to need to be replaced in the spring.”

  I did know that. Justin was a world-renowned stunt skier and had more than his fair share of magazine spreads. But . . . he was getting older, and the competition was getting younger. What money he made now had to see us through a very long time.

  That or I’d have to explain why I had several million dollars of unmarked bills buried in the barn. Money I took not to spend, but to keep out of my father’s hands. Money I took to punish him more than anything else. Money that I had suspected would be tracked back to us if we used it.

  “Don’t worry.” Justin kept his arms around my shoulders. “It won’t be a long trip, and if it goes as planned, I won’t have to do more sponsorships. We’ll be set for life.”

  “Are you serious?” The urge to pepper him with questions rushed through me. Why hadn’t he said anything earlier? He grinned at me, the dimples that Bear had inherited showing up through the two-day stubble.

  “Trust me, baby. This is the score I’ve been waiting for.”

  Score. I snorted softly. As if he were some sort of bad-ass.

  The money he’d made through the years was always enough, but barely. Seventy-five thousand was standard for him, and I made sure the foal crop each year paid for itself and then some. Not a lot, but at least I wasn’t taking away from what he made.

  “I wanted to surprise you when I came home with the check. Maybe I could cash it and we could roll around on all the bills naked on the bed.” He winked at me and I shook my head, laughing again. Laughter . . . so absent before, and my life was filled with it now.

  “You are something else, you know that?” I arched an eyebrow at him.

  He grinned down at me. “That’s why you married me, isn’t it? ’Cause I’m a special guy.”

  The green myst swirled around the truck and pushed the hulking weight from the edge of the water, out until it was over the depths. The ice cracked under the weight of the truck as it slid, rolling across the shoreline until a weak spot gave. The truck went sideways and down until the entire driver’s side was under water, leaving the passenger side sticking out at an angle. Justin and Bear were on the driver’s side, and the water swirled up around them, filling their side slowly. I blinked through blood running down the side of my head, the smoke and taste of death magic burning my lungs. I reached across for Bear, but I couldn’t move my legs.

  Justin wasn’t making any noise; he wasn’t fighting to get out. To get us all out.

  “Justin.” I croaked his name out, even though I knew . . . the angle of his neck was one I’d seen too many times, and it was far from natural.

  I twisted in my seat, and pushed Justin from my mind because there was nothing I could do for him, and Bear needed me. My son whimpered and reached for me with his right hand, but my seatbelt had tightened, jerking me back against the seat. My left wrist was broken, I was sure of it, but worse, I was pinned by the side door. It had bent inward from one of the revolutions of the truck and had both my legs jammed tightly under the metal.

  “Baby, I’m here.” I pushed with my unbroken hand against the metal around me as I reached for him with my left.

  “Mama . . .” His whisper faded with each syllable.

  “I’m here, Bear.” I stretched for him. Stretched for his hand that he was no longer lifting to me as it flopped into the water filling up around him, circling around his chest, creeping up to his chin where it stopped.

  “Bear, Bear, talk to me!” I fought my seatbelt and the metal trapping me, holding me away from my Bear. Panic surged, and I fought to get my hand to my lower back, to my knife. My fingers found the handle and I ripped it out, cut the seatbelt in a single slash, but I was still trapped by my legs.

  Removing the seatbelt gave me the inches I needed to grab his arm, so I could circle my hands around his. I pulled him and his body flopped toward me. Flopped. Flopped. Limp. Dying. Words and emotions scattered through me like explosions gone wrong.

  My heart. My boy. The skin of my legs tore, as I fought to get to him, so I could do CPR. It wasn’t enough, my movement didn’t free me enough to pull him out.

  “Mama . . . it hurts,” he whispered. So softly, slipping away from me. I was going to lose him.

  I screamed for him, screamed his name. “Bear, you hang on, baby, hang on!”

  The click of a weapon cut through my screams, taking me to my past in an instant, a tendril of green swirling in around my face.

  The tip of the gun slid through the front passenger window in front of me. I clamped my mouth shut and swallowed the screams as Justin’s head jumped, a bullet slamming through it. His blood sprayed the water, invisible against the black ink of the lake.

  A second click of the weapon, the brush of magic against my skin and I closed my eyes. At least I would be with my boys. With my Bear.

  I let a breath out and waited for the sound of the hammer to fall.

  There was nothing, just a quiet sloshing of feet and legs through the water, loose chunks of ice bumping against the outside of the truck and then my head exploded with bright white light and shattering pain and my head slid under the dark water.

  Chapter Two

  Dreams, just dreams. The accident wasn’t real. We had made it home from the Christmas party with no problems, no hint of magic or death. How often had nightmares of losing Justin or Bear visited me over the years? Often enough that I shouldn’t have been surprised that I’d had another.

  I told myself that simple and yet so very complex lie as I swam upward out of the mire that was a drugged sleep, the heavy taste of chemicals coating my tongue that screamed I’d been put out and not knocked out. Sleep, but more like the sleep of the dead. No, not dead. Just tired. I let myself live in the lies a little longer.

  We must have stayed too late at the party. Had I drank too much? No, that wasn’t possible at a Mormon party. I knew I was lying to myself, but I let the lies stay at the front of my mind because that was safer. That was a better place for them as I struggled to put the pieces together. I needed time to let the truth sink underneath the fog of almost awake, while I still clung to the edges of sleep and the reprieve it held for my fear.

  There had been no accident. Justin was alive. Bear was alive. Maybe I’d been thrown off one of the three-year-old colts as I introduced him to the saddle. That would explain the pain in my back and legs. The thrumming pound of my head. The ache in my wrist.

  But it did not explain away the ache in my heart, nor the taste of magic at the back of my throat.

  I groaned and tried to shift my position—when had our bed been this hard under my back? A sharp pain made me suck in a breath, the pain of a knife cutting through my ribs, sticking me hard.

  A deep voice I almost recognized, with the accent hailing from the East Coast, rolled through the shadows of my slow awakening.

  “The wife is alive, bos
s. You want me to finish it?”

  Finish it. Those two words reverberated through my brain like a gong and the accident welled up in my mind, washing away the last of the lies I so desperately clung to.

  The truck rolling and going into the river, Justin’s neck, the gunshot, the green swirling auras of magic . . . Bear. Reaching for me, crying for me. Screeching metal, cracking ice, the cold of the water seeping around me, the blood dripping into the slow lazy current, the violent explosion under us as we slid down the hill . . .

  I opened my eyes, found myself looking at an unfamiliar ceiling, pocked with scars like someone had thrown pencils up to stick into the cheap panels, over and over. Cracks ran through the dirty gray panels, and I stared at them while my consciousness caught up to the fact I was no longer asleep.

  I made myself turn my head to the right where the voice had been speaking, only to see the edge of the speaker’s body as he left the room. Dark pants underneath a doctor’s lab coat, but the unmistakable outline of a gun under the back of that white coat. Tall, easily over six foot, but lean, not the beefy muscled man I’d already imagined. I watched the door, waiting for him to come back, and when he didn’t, I couldn’t deny where I was any longer.

  Or why I was there.

  Hospital. Accident. Death. Magic.

  I couldn’t close my eyes, because when I did I saw my boy. I saw his hand reaching for me, then slowly, slowly dropping into the water as his life slid away from him.

  “Bear.” His name was on my lips, and I knew the answer to the question I was asking because my heart didn’t beat the way it had yesterday. Today it was hollow, empty as it had been before my boys.

  Grief roared over me like a lion swallowing me whole and I couldn’t see past it. I didn’t want to see past it. I let it take me, and I don’t know for how long. I only knew the light in the room from the only window shifted over time, slowly darkening. A nurse came in and tried to give me something. A sedative.